Re: [boost] Ann: Floating Point Utilities Review starts today

From: John Phillips (phillips_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-02-26 13:20:30

John Maddock wrote:
> The review of Johan Rade's floating point utilities starts today.
> 

I haven't had time to do a detailed review, but from the about an hour I 
have spent with the library, I'm in favor off it.

The documentation is adaquite, since there is very little rationale to 
explain and the whole goal is to implement the TR1 functions (with the 
slight addition of the consistent serialization). I would like to see it 
add a couple more examples with some more explanitory text, since I'm 
not sure everyone looking at the docs will understand how much they need 
what the library does, but for anyone who already knows that there are 
problems that need to be solved, it is good.

I am also concerned about merging it into the MathTools library. That is 
certainly where it belongs in a logical sense, but the MathTools library 
is already huge and the documentation is extensive. This small but 
sometimes essential library could easily get lost in the flood of 
information that is the MathTools documentation. Assuming this library 
is accepted, some thought about how to make this component obvious in 
the larger documentation is required.

I didn't get a chance to try anything beyond the simple examples, but 
those seem to work on a PPC Mac running OSX 10.5. I plan to use these 
pieces in other places, but I haven't had the chance, yet.

I don't claim to be an expert on the detailed cross platform issues that 
this library addresses. I'm well versed in computational numerics, but 
not as well versed on these portability details.

I vote in favor of accepting the library.

John Phillips